


Thursday, Once a Year

by St_Salieri



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:36:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/St_Salieri/pseuds/St_Salieri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the most you can be thankful for is not having died yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thursday, Once a Year

**Author's Note:**

> I have a ficlet to share prompted by [](http://snickfic.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://snickfic.livejournal.com/)**snickfic** : _For the fic challenge, can I have something about Jo and Ellen celebrating Thanksgiving?_

 

The year Jo turned fourteen, Ellen closed the Roadhouse for Thanksgiving for the first time.

It had been a rough year in the community. Eddie Hastings had lost his hunting partner Bud to a poltergeist, and Big Zach's youngest son had been taken by a Black Dog. Talk at the bar had gotten darker as the deaths piled up, and hunters lingered over their drinks and fingered their weapons with an intensity that drove Ellen to stash an extra knife near the register, just in case. Jo had gotten her heart broken by some kid from school and had started sporting a buzz-cut and eyebrow ring in the throes of teenaged angst. Between the increasingly heavy atmosphere in the bar and Jo's sullen melodrama, Ellen was at the end of her rope. Thanksgiving was usually good for business – it wasn't like most of these hunters and drifters and hard-luck cases had anywhere better to be – but this year it was time for change.

"Nothing doing," she told her grumpy customers firmly when they dared to complain. "This here's a family day, and I got my girl to think of. We're closed tomorrow. We'll be open again on Friday."

Ellen set her alarm and was up early the next morning, and the turkey was in the oven when Jo finally yawned her way down the hall a few hours before noon.

"What's this?" she asked, pausing in the doorway, thin arms folded tight across her chest against the chill of a Nebraska November. Ellen didn't look up from the pan of potatoes she was peeling.

"What's it look like?" she said mildly. "You forgotten what day it is?"

Ellen glanced up at her daughter, saw Jo open her mouth, saw the million and one sarcastic comments that seemed to be the major part of her vocabulary these days. But Jo just tightened her jaw and shrugged.

"Just...been a while since we've done this," she said. _Since Dad_ , was the unspoken conclusion to that sentence. Ellen wondered when she'd gotten so good at hearing everything her daughter didn't say and so bad at actually talking to her. "Don't think there's all that much to be thankful for," she muttered.

Ellen straightened up and fixed her with a glare. "You're alive, ain't you?" Alive and fighting, unlike Bud and Zach's son and so many of the poor souls who made their way through her doors over the years, and by God she was going to do her best to keep it that way. "I'd say that's reason enough. Now, are you going to help your mother with these damn potatoes, or keep shooting your mouth off?"

"Fine," Jo said, giving her best eye-roll, but Ellen caught the smile at the corner of her mouth when she caught the peeler Ellen tossed her. "When did you become Martha Stewart all of a sudden?"

"Please," Ellen said crisply, opening the oven to do a quick baste. "You think I don't know my way around dead things and fire? The things I could teach that woman."

When the knock on the back door came a few hours later, Ellen cursed and tried to remember if she'd actually hung the "closed" sign. She cracked the door to find half a dozen of her regulars standing on the porch looking sheepish. She folded her arms across her chest and barricaded herself in the middle of the door.

"I told you boys we're closed today," she said firmly. "You'll have to do your drinking somewhere else."

Eddie Hastings – who seemed to be the unofficial leader of the group, if the nudges the others gave him were anything to go by – stepped forward reluctantly.

"We know, ma'am," he said. "We're not staying. It's just...well, it's been a rough year, and you've always given us a welcome here. We're grateful for that, and it seemed like the right day to say something. We just wanted to drop something off for you and your girl."

Eddie handed her a heavy plastic bag. She peered inside and found a couple of store-bought pies – pumpkin, apple – and a large bag of cheap white dinner rolls. When she looked up in surprise, Eddie was giving her a nod and a crooked smile and urging the others off the porch.

"Hang on," she found herself saying. The speed at which the group of hardened hunters stopped and stared up at her hopefully was almost endearing, and she rolled her eyes at her own soft-heartedness.

"Looks like I bought too big of a bird," she said, and hefted the bag. "And these would go well with the pecan I've got in the oven. Unless you have somewhere else to be?"

Jo's eyes lit up when she saw them file into the kitchen, and she beamed with pride when Eddie complimented the way she handled a carving knife. The room was too hot and noisy, too many people in too small a space, but it felt almost homey.

Tomorrow things would be back to normal. Tomorrow these men would be drinking too much and eyeing each other with suspicion, and Ellen would do her damn best to keep her daughter away from them and the world they represented. But for tonight...for tonight, it felt almost like family.

 

 

**End**


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